Update: CyanogenMod says owner hijacked domain, demanded $10,000

Android enthusiasts trying to reach CyanogenMod.com, the website for the popular community-maintained firmware of the same name, will find themselves staring at a blank filler site as of today. As has been detailed in a blog post up on the new CyanogenMod.org, the owner of the original domain (one Ahmet Deveci) name shut the site down after he was discovered impersonating CyanogenMod founder Steve "Cyanogen" Kondik for the purpose of cutting referral deals with other sites.

When confronted and asked to surrender the keys amicably, Deveci responded by demanding $10,000 for the domain, an amount that the team "won't (and can't) pay." CyanogenMod team members were able to reclaim ownership of the project's Twitter and Facebook accounts, but upon being locked out of the system Deveci promptly deleted the domain's DNS records, rendering the site unreachable.

"We don’t like how this played out, and we are deeply hurt," the team said in its statement. "Likewise, we are deeply saddened at the confusion this may have caused the community. We will continue to be open about the what, when, [and] how, but unfortunately, we may never know the ‘why’—though greed comes to mind. The team itself has not made a profit off of CM and that is not our goal. But to have one of our own betray the community like this is beyond our comprehension."

9to5Google reports that Deveci originally donated the domain name to the team at some point after the domain's registration in August of 2009.

For now, the CyanogenMod team has opened up shop on CyanogenMod.org and has initiated ICANN's domain name dispute process to reclaim its old URL. The team will be pursuing legal action against Deveci to regain control of the domain if necessary. Until then, the team has warned that all CyanogenMod.com e-mail addresses are currently out of its control, and it is asking anyone who entered into a referral deal with the imposter to contact Kondik directly to help build its legal case.

Update: Soon after publication, Ahmet Deveci claimed on his Twitter page that events had been "misinterpreted" and that he did indeed intend to transfer the CyanogenMod.com domain name to Steve Kondik without incident.

"No money has ever been extorted from CM nor will it ever be," Deveci told Ars. Ahmet claims that Kondik once asked him how much he would be willing to sell the domain for. "I replied as a joke and said $10K. He didn't even reply after that, he went offline, and simply started changing all my logins access and passwords."

In response to the claims that he was impersonating Kondik to cut referral deals with other sites, Deveci also claims that there was a misunderstanding. Someone claiming to be from the Cyanogenmod team reached out to N2Acards, a site that sells microSD cards for running stock Android on Barnes & Noble's Nook tablets, and tried to collect money from them. "The guys on the team just assumed it was me because I assisted N2A by placing forum links on our forum, in return for their donations," Deveci told Ars, "All agreed and above board."

As of this writing, Deveci claims that the CyanogenMod.com domain has "practically" been transferred to the ownership of Kondik and the CyanogenMod team. Fifteen minutes after we spoke with Deveci, Kondik's Twitter account confirmed this development.

"Why would I want to make money from a non-profit free organisation that I have so much passion in?" asked Deveci. "Go figure."

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites

This all seems rather sudden. What could/would prompt the creator of clockworkmod (see Stone's comment above) to abruptly reclaim the community page of a profitless entity?

You misunderstood Stone's post. Koush Dutta is the creator of clockwork mod, yes, but he did not take/reclaim the domain. Koush's Google+ post identified the individual who DID take the domain (Ahmet Deveci).

This all seems rather sudden. What could/would prompt the creator of clockworkmod (see Stone's comment above) to abruptly reclaim the community page of a profitless entity?

You misunderstood Stone's post. Koush Dutta is the creator of clockwork mod, yes, but he did not take/reclaim the domain. Koush's Google+ post identified the individual who DID take the domain (Ahmet Deveci).

Ah, you're right. Explains my confusion as to why someone who played a role in the modding community would seek to damage one of it's most popular mods.

How can the owner "hijack" that which he owns? He may have acted as an ass, but he didn't "hijack" the domain, he merely stopped giving it to CyanogenMod.

Because, as has been mentioned several times, the CyanogenMod team owns the copyright on "CyanogenMod" and have been using the website for several years. The ICANN dispute process exists because domains are supposed to go to the group that makes sense, not the one with the most money.

If he didn't want to support them anymore, there are several nice ways to go about that:

* Transfer the site to someone else and have them pay all future renewal fees. * Ask the CyanogenMod team to pay him back the ~$5/year a domain name costs (with interest?) if he really wants to be vindictive.

How can the owner "hijack" that which he owns? He may have acted as an ass, but he didn't "hijack" the domain, he merely stopped giving it to CyanogenMod.

Well its sort of like un-donating something. They built up the site under his express approval and then held them for ransom years down the line. It would be like donating your car then using a spare key to take it back a few years later. The legality of it all may be somewhat of a gray area, but the morality of it is pretty clear cut.

How can the owner "hijack" that which he owns? He may have acted as an ass, but he didn't "hijack" the domain, he merely stopped giving it to CyanogenMod.

Because, as has been mentioned several times, the CyanogenMod team owns the copyright on "CyanogenMod" and have been using the website for several years. The ICANN dispute process exists because domains are supposed to go to the group that makes sense, not the one with the most money.

If he didn't want to support them anymore, there are several nice ways to go about that:

* Transfer the site to someone else and have them pay all future renewal fees. * Ask the CyanogenMod team to pay him back the ~$5/year a domain name costs (with interest?) if he really wants to be vindictive.

There's no way that asking for $10,000 was a reasonable response.

He is bad ass, but he still controlled the domain. Domain wasn't revoked by ICANN yet. He certainly didn't hijack it either.

I'm sorry, his 'apology' is anything but and it offers no explanation to his actions or his emails including this one:

“Hi, so you think by removing all my access across the infrastructure was going to be a great idea? We had a chat yesterday, you’ve decided to end this bitter. How about I just change the DNS entries right now. CM will practically go down.”

What context could that have been taken out of that doesn't implicate this guy as a horrible, immature person? Either CM is making that quote up or he got the negative attention he deserves and is trying to save face.

I'm sorry, his 'apology' is anything but and it offers no explanation to his actions or his emails including this one:

“Hi, so you think by removing all my access across the infrastructure was going to be a great idea? We had a chat yesterday, you’ve decided to end this bitter. How about I just change the DNS entries right now. CM will practically go down.”

What context could that have been taken out of that doesn't implicate this guy as a horrible, immature person? Either CM is making that quote up or he got the negative attention he deserves and is trying to save face.

As is so often the case with this sort of thing, it all comes down to "he said, she said," and people from the CM team wouldn't respond to our requests for further comment. If Deveci were really so willing to give up the domain, I doubt CM would have taken the trouble to completely change domain names in the first place, but in the end he relinquished control to them and it's all been rendered moot.

Although it's good this so-called hijacking issue has been resolved, I'm somewhat...somewhat...concerned about the use of the word "hijack" here. By hijacking, does it mean the domain name account was accessed without its actual owner's knowledge and consent to seize control of the domain name, or?

I realize using the word "hijack" seems to be appropriate in this specific article and subsequent discussion. But unless CyanogenMod actually bought and registered that domain name themselves or through an authorized agent or so, then the domain name was "broken into" and taken control of by someone else, well...I don't know...using "hijack" or maybe "stealing" or "theft" kinda tends to stretch things a bit beyond what they're perhaps generally known or used for.

At least, based on the details provided in this story. Anywho, just my thoughts, and - again - it's good this one's essentially resolved.

I may be just selectively remembering things, but this sort of conflict between people wanting to be right and not wanting to understand each other seems to happen quite often, and quite public, among the maintainers of community projects.

How can the owner "hijack" that which he owns? He may have acted as an ass, but he didn't "hijack" the domain, he merely stopped giving it to CyanogenMod.

Because, as has been mentioned several times, the CyanogenMod team owns the copyright on "CyanogenMod" and have been using the website for several years. The ICANN dispute process exists because domains are supposed to go to the group that makes sense, not the one with the most money.

If he didn't want to support them anymore, there are several nice ways to go about that:

* Transfer the site to someone else and have them pay all future renewal fees. * Ask the CyanogenMod team to pay him back the ~$5/year a domain name costs (with interest?) if he really wants to be vindictive.

There's no way that asking for $10,000 was a reasonable response.

$10,000.00 wasn't a reasonable response. That makes me think that there could have been a misunderstanding. I'll have to hear both sides of the story to really form an opinion.

Well this looks like such a mess that we'll never know for sure what happened. Chances are we will never hear the complete story.

I would think the conversation up to the $10k price 'joke', was very tense and serious. I don't know exactly why, but $10k is not a truly absurd price compared to say, asking $1 million dollars in nonconsecutive bills.

This leads me to believe that Ahmet Deveci was either somewhat serious, or has an absolutely HORRIBLE sense for jokes.

Seeing how it played out, I'm convinced Ahmet did try to extort them, and he's backing down now after he realized what an massively stupid idea that was. Nothing else makes sense, and there are too many people involved on the CM side for it just to be made up or blown out of proportion. There was zero reason to remove the DNS entries unless he was being malicious.

More generally, this is why serious open source projects start foundations and force all contributors to assign copyright. Too many bad things can happen when you trust that people won't go nuts. Power should never be in one person's hands.

Actually their in-device links all use other domains, probably ones that Steve had full control of. Ahmet has never been a douche really before, so it MAY in fact be a convoluted situation. Ahmet also in the past arranged some ad revenue stuff paying TO CM, so it seems odd that he'd be trying to make himself a buck now.

What we know is he asked $10,000 for the domain name. CM shut him out. He deleted the domain entries to try to shut them out. Then he turned over the domain to them.

Doesn't sound like a joke; sounds like he asked it seriously. Deleting the entries and shutting down access to the site doesn't support his claims of it being a joke. At least he came around and the team can get back on track, doing what they love - helping us escape the carrier and manufacturer corruption of Android.

It seems pretty clear that the domain was taken down without notice and Mr Deveci isn't denying that. So if he didn't hold the CM.com domain for ransom, then why was the site taken down in the first place?

Mr Deveci is cooperating now because he understands the repercussions of his actions would not reflect well on him.

It's good that the CM team is getting control of the domain. What happens now? Does everyone forget and move on or do we dig deeper and find out the real motivation behind the site take-down?

It seems pretty clear that the domain was taken down without notice and Mr Deveci isn't denying that. So if he didn't hold the CM.com domain for ransom, then why was the site taken down in the first place?

Mr Deveci is cooperating now because he understands the repercussions of his actions would not reflect well on him.

It's good that the CM team is getting control of the domain. What happens now? Does everyone forget and move on or do we dig deeper and find out the real motivation behind the site take-down?

It would be a waste of time to dig any deeper, and really, I think we know all there is to know that's worth knowing. Time to just move on.

It seems pretty clear that the domain was taken down without notice and Mr Deveci isn't denying that. So if he didn't hold the CM.com domain for ransom, then why was the site taken down in the first place?

Yes, but by who.

The domain itself has it's nameservers pointed at Cloudflare, which is a content and DNS caching service. The DNS never went down, I checked each time I read the drama unfold and only found a blank page.

That means the website went down (cached content expired or deleted), but that could have been because the webmaster removed the files off the old host after moving onto the new web host.

So, you don't really know who did what.

But feel free to jump to conclusions like all the other chimps flinging poo.

But feel free to jump to conclusions like all the other chimps flinging poo.

*shrug* Steve (Cyanogen) has built up a lot of goodwill over the past few years, I'm going to trust him over some other guy. It's also really implausible that the entire rest of the core CM team decided to team up to make this other guy look bad.

But feel free to jump to conclusions like all the other chimps flinging poo.

How is it jumping to conclusions when CM released this quote from one of his emails before the domain went offline:

“Hi, so you think by removing all my access across the infrastructure was going to be a great idea? We had a chat yesterday, you’ve decided to end this bitter. How about I just change the DNS entries right now. CM will practically go down.”

Please tell me what context makes this a defend-able statement? How could you misunderstand his actions after a statement like that? This even contradicts his explanation 'it was a joke'.

Yes we should move on and get over it, but this guy is still guilty of asshatery and should be labeled as such, until he proves otherwise (he hasn't). (Metaphorically) Even if a thief returns what he stole he still goes to jail for stealing it.

I'm sorry, his 'apology' is anything but and it offers no explanation to his actions or his emails including this one:

“Hi, so you think by removing all my access across the infrastructure was going to be a great idea? We had a chat yesterday, you’ve decided to end this bitter. How about I just change the DNS entries right now. CM will practically go down.”

What context could that have been taken out of that doesn't implicate this guy as a horrible, immature person? Either CM is making that quote up or he got the negative attention he deserves and is trying to save face.

Actually, if you engaged in an argument with someone, things were getting a bit emotional, and they said what is quoted above, and you wanted to REALLY make him look bad even though you knew damn well he'd never actually do it, you could just delete the dns entries yourself, totally destroy the guys reputation, AND take ownership of the domain away from him. There may be evidence to the contrary, but without full disclosure of ALL of the emails between the guys fighting it out, we'll probably never know for sure. But, if you think quotes like the one above are "evidence" that he actually did delete the dns entires and for sure, no matter how you look at it, an indication of a horrible, immature person as you put it, then you are quite naive.

EDIT: Also, what id like to know, is if there is actual evidence(as in IP logs) that links the dns deletion to this guy?